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Sunday, March 19, 2017

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, August 1939

Pulp covers don't get more lurid than in the Weird Menace genre, and this one from the August 1939 issue of TERROR TALES raises that luridness to new levels. But you would have spotted it right away on the newsstand, wouldn't you? Inside are stories by stories by pulp stalwarts Wyatt Blassingame, Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer), and Ray Cummings, writing under his own name and in collaboration with his daughter Gabrielle as Gabriel Wilson.

It's best to read the weird menace pulps with a strong sense of humor and also a strong sense of the bizarre and ridiculous. If you take them seriously, then you may develop mental problems and have serious issues with women!

I think that was kinda sorta the audience hoped-for, in part. Cummings wasn't selling too well to other sorts of markets by then, I think, except for the stories Frederik Pohl would buy for his Popular/Fictioneers sf magazines out of a sense of respect for what Cummunings once had been...I've forced myself through a couple/few John Knox shudder-lite stories Daisy Bacon ran in DETECTIVE STORY, and a few Hugh Cave and Henry Kuttner examples..."The Cone" by H.G. Wells was a kind of distant ancestor...Edgar Wallace, closer in...

i adore a lot of pulp authors who wrote in the weird menace magazines (norvell w. page, hugh b cave, frederick c. davis, etc.), but bruno fischer and arthur j burks are my favorites of the guys who i think of as core "weird menace authors," though yes, they both wrote other stuff. i never read a weird menace magazine where the bruno fischer story did not stand near or at the top.